Server Down = Rankings Gone?

Can having your server go down harm your rankings? It appears so!

When apache and cpanel on my txt2day server tried to update itself automatically, something went wrong that required a server reboot. Unfortunately, I was out of town and couldn’t do it until 4 days later.

It looks like Googlebot came through while it was down though - that’s when problems occurred.

Doing a query for just the word txt2day shows a totally different site at the #1 spot. I’m not sure why, maybe somebody can explain.

Doing a site:txt2day.com shows a couple sub pages, but not the home page.

I’m usually willing to give things like this time, but it’s been almost 8 days now… and googlebot hasn’t reindexed.

I’ve re-submitted the URL to google, changed text on the homepage so that googlebot will see it’s changed, filed a reinclusion request for the homepage, and linked to it from several sites (including this one)

I’m not sure what else to do. The site used to be in the top 3 of google for any text message related term. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if and when the rankings return.

To compare, Yahoo picked up that the site was back about 2 days later. MSN has re-listed the site, but with the wrong title and no rankings now.

July 13th, 2007